I'm with Matthew Kane. The gamification drives me away from the SO based websites. The vast majority of forums are terrible, but I'm not sure SO has solved the problem, and certainly people like myself and Matthew stay away. It remains to be seen whether we are such a small minority.

When Joel Spolsky and I set out to design the Stack Exchange Q&A engine in 2008 – then known as Stack Overflow – we borrowed liberally and unapologetically from any online system that we felt worked. Some of our notable influences included: Reddit and Digg voting Xbox 360 achievements Wikiped...

Apple is just pursuing the video game model but in a wider context of a platform that is meant to do more than just play games. Nintendo and others have been doing business like this for decades now. As a customer, I don't believe their policies benefit me that much. The app store is still full of garbage that obscures the truly amazing and useful, and their policies don't drive the creation of the latter. In the future, I intend to stay as far away from the king's court as I can, both as a customer and as a developer.

I enjoy my iPhone tremendously; I think it's the most important product Apple has ever created and one they were born to make. As a consumer who has waited far too long for the phone industry to get the swift kick in the ass it so richly deserved, I'm entirely on Apple's side here. But as a so...